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45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero

blogs.nvidia.com

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Re: 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero

#411

Post by mzhaase »

CalRobert wrote: post #369
kingofmen wrote: post #362

Points for effort, but this will do literal nothing to appease the opposition, since the "water use" thing is a myth anyway. It's probably good, it sounds like it will be more efficient and efficiency saves resources for other uses, but politically it's completely useless.

It always seemed weird - where does the water go, after all? I gather it isn't turned in to H2 and O2. I assume it leaves the data center hotter than when it came in, which seems like the real issue?

Evaporates and rains down in a different area which is not necessarily the same it evaporated in. Leading to potentially local net water loss.

Re: 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero

#412

Post by jmalicki »

jrnichols wrote: post #164
arjie wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if one of the amenities in a high-end residential building could be a cabinet haha! That would be amazing. Doesn't make economic sense, but I'd love it. Would love to explain that to my wife. "I know that one has the pool, but we can rack my servers in this one if we live there".

Something here about water usage, a small data center, and a swimming pool. Combining the three may either be awesome or tragic! I like this idea. A small cage in an apartment complex would be a huge selling point. Or even a La La Land on the corner, urban DC in the back. Winning across the board.

> water usage, a small data center, and a swimming pool

Swimming pool? The cooling can be for a hot tub!

Re: 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero

#413

Post by customguy »

dirasieb wrote: post #313
coldtea wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would a citation be needed?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy)

Do you also demand a citation when someone says dogs have four legs instead of realizing you know nothing about the subject at hand and quietly looking it up yourself, and then maybe asking more questions?

Re: 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero

#414

Post by customguy »

croes wrote: post #318
coldtea wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The burden on proof should be on "dumping hot water to a river doesn't damage its ecosystem" rather than the opposite...

That’s not what they are doing > capture heat directly at the source and transport it to outdoor dry coolers, essentially large radiator coils positioned outside the building. The heat goes into the air

The correct place to bring that up is here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48672306

Dumping hot water into rivers harms ecosystems regardless of whether anyone happens to do it right now, and asking for a citation for that is such a WTF in and of itself we really shouldn't gloss over it.

Re: 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero

#415

Post by tucnak »

reaperducer wrote: post #79
tucnak wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the way we heat up the earth right now, i don't think you have to worry about heating So what, winters would be no more? Snow will disappear, no more ice-men and christmas trees, and subzero conditions in general, too?

And no more food. Or at least not enough of it to feed very many people. You do eat, don't you?

Christmas food?

Re: 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero

#416

Post by pjdesno »

j45 wrote: post #402
pjdesno wrote: post #395

Water use isn't a myth. Our data center is mostly air-cooled, with 100F hot aisles and chilled water going to heat exchangers in every third rack position, although some of our newer GPU racks use chilled water directly. For most of the year that means we don't need chillers - the warm water return is sufficiently hotter than outdoor temp that heat "flows downhill" with a bit of pumping. But we use an evaporative coo…

May I ask where this datacenter you're referring to is located? State and country would be super helpful. I disagree if there is an assumption or premise that all datacenters use water for cooling. Datacenters are not built or operated the same, nor have a requirement for water cooling, or evaporative cooling. Water use is partially a myth for sure, because it's not a certainty or requirement in every datacenter, eve…

It's near Springfield, Massachusetts.

My point is not that evaporative cooling is necessary - it's that it's efficient, and therefore common. I found some 10-year-old info from our datacenter, and it looks like mid-summer months add an extra 20% in power consumption for cooling, in large part due to running the chillers, which are industrial-scale active A/C units to raise the exhaust heat temperature. Average outdoor temp (24-hr average) during those months was 70-75F.

It's a pretty small datacenter, so getting rid of the evaporative cooler would probably "only" cost us a couple of megawatts or so in additional power consumption. (and maybe 15 million pounds of carbon emissions - our power is hydro, but electricity is fungible, so every kWh we use probably results in an additional kWh of fossil fuel generation somewhere in the grid)

Re: 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero

#417

Post by pjdesno »

randallsquared wrote: post #326
krupan wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"compared to various other uses" You realize how that vague and open ended clause completely undermines any point you are trying to make, right?

I assumed people here mostly already knew that water usage for data centers was trivial compared to lots of uses like alfalfa, non-data-center power generation, etc. My point used that as a foundation, so I agree that if you didn't already know that, it's undermined. It's a quick thing to dig into though, via search or LLM. You could start with Andy Masley: xcancel.com/andymasley / x.com/andymasley

Most people don't plant an alfalfa field in the desert and then try to use the local municipal water supply for irrigation.

Some of the folks looking to build datacenters to cash in on the AI craze aren't as bright as that.

Re: 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero

#418

Post by tmaly »

amluto wrote: post #12

This opens up an interesting synergy: district heating. 45C is low but not unworkable for a district heating loop, and a data center might be able to make a nice pitch to a community if the data center offers to provide heat to a district heating system for free. This brings the value to the local community of a nearby datacenter up from near zero to potentially a few million dollars per year. Summer is still an issu…

It would be interesting if we had a way to turn heat into stored energy like a type of capacitor.

Re: 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero

#419

Post by randallsquared »

pjdesno wrote: post #417
randallsquared wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assumed people here mostly already knew that water usage for data centers was trivial compared to lots of uses like alfalfa, non-data-center power generation, etc. My point used that as a foundation, so I agree that if you didn't already know that, it's undermined. It's a quick thing to dig into though, via search or LLM. You could start with Andy Masley: xcancel.com/andymasley / x.com/andymasley

Most people don't plant an alfalfa field in the desert and then try to use the local municipal water supply for irrigation. Some of the folks looking to build datacenters to cash in on the AI craze aren't as bright as that.

Water is pretty fungible, so while it might not be that alfalfa fields in the Arizona and southern California desert are irrigated from a residential pipe, it's the same water either way. Whether the water arrives at the field/datacenter via municipal pipe or irrigation canal doesn't seem relevant, except that a municipal pipe probably could supply most datacenters' needs, while desert alfalfa has a whole different scale of usage.

But if your point is that no one would farm alfalfa in the desert and use water that would otherwise be available for residential use, you are quite wrong.

Re: 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero

#420

Post by coldtea »

__alexs wrote: post #355
croes wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess parent means the heat has to somewhere, closed system or not. Some nuclear power plants use rivers and lakes, that’s bad for their ecosystems if it’s too much but this system uses dry coolers so the extra heat should be negligible

It goes to space like all the other heat does otherwise we'd be living on a ball of gently rotating lava.

Why're living on a ball of gently (and not so gently) rising temperatures...
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